Scottish Labour’s 2019 conference, which starts in Dundee tomorrow, isn’t taking place in the most auspicious of circumstances, to put it kindly. The branch office is trailing a breathtaking 22 points behind the SNP in the latest Holyrood polling, 8 points behind the Tories, and the gap is getting bigger.
Westminster polling isn’t a great deal better, with the SNP 15 points ahead despite having been in power for 12 years and doggedly attempting to commit electoral suicide with a raft of increasingly unpopular policies (more on that to come).
Donations have shrivelled to under £36,000 in the last year. (For perspective, the 2018 Wings fundraiser made over £153,000.) The North Britain branch has shed a fifth of its membership in a matter of months, has had to give away conference passes for free to try to fill seats, and is embroiled in a bitter spat over its EU policy.
So it’d be a tough time to be Richard Leonard, if anyone knew who that was.
But luckily, according to our latest Panelbase poll, they don’t.
There’s nothing particularly unusual about the general public struggling to recall the names of opposition leaders, or pick them out of a lineup. It’s fundamentally quite an obscure and unimportant job, and most folk have lives to get on with. But still, the fact that barely over a third of Scottish Labour voters can identify the man who’s been leading their party for over a year and a quarter can’t be great news.
Even when presented with a list of names to jog their memory, over a quarter of people who voted Labour in July 2017 said they simply didn’t know who their leader was. We can forgive the 16% who said Jeremy Corbyn because that’s technically the actual truth – “Scottish Labour” is merely an accounting unit and a brand name of the real Labour Party, and Corbyn is its only genuine leader – but the 15% who plumped for former chief gopher Kezia Dugdale is harder to fathom.
At least no Labour voters picked the entirely fictional Alan Syme – who still did better with the public overall than James Kelly and Jackie Baillie – but Leonard only just managed to get over half the Labour voters who picked one of the three top answers.
Not counting interim leaders, Scottish Labour have had four different occupants of the sort-of-hot seat since the independence referendum a little over four years ago. So they’re about due another one, but if Leonard gets the boot soon the genuine question is whether anyone will notice.
